The problem with maps, said Michael Jones, CTO of Google Earth is that “it takes more than money to get good GIS data, it actually takes data that’s available to get.” Dan Karran has transcribed an audio recording of a talk that Jones gave at the Cambridge Conference, in which he mentions that for Hyderabad in India, Google has asked users to fill in data regarding cities. Google has provided them with GPS kits, and has a pilot running in 50 cities. As is almost always the case with crowdsourced data the inevitable question is – is this data accurate?. Says Jones:
“when you have a few million users, you can do statistical analysis of contributed data. You can get the same thing from different IP addresses over a long period of time, with a high correlation, you can start to believe in it. You can show that with a tentative colour, and have people click on whether they believe it or not and have confirmatory comments. You can actually converge to pretty good data and it has the advantage of, when the road is closed, you can click on that road and say it’s closed today. If you’re having a block party, you can say the block is closed this day. Traffic data that’s up to date every day.”
I wonder how open this system will be — it is likely to be limited by the number of GPS kits, right? Why not just ask users to sign up, and enter data online.
In contrast, Yahoo India has partnered with KPCB and Sherpalo ventures funded company CE Infosystems.
GigaOm meanwhile, has an interesting post, likening Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ attempts to take on google to Linux taking on Microsoft. Wales’ company Wikia intends to combine search results with human context from Wikia wikis. Om believes it’s an uphill task, though – given the cost of infrastructure, and that though it may not be able to beat Google, it will provide people with an alternative.
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